Please help me understand this?

[jennymanara]

I want to understand in real depth what makes the left so vulnerable to accepting obvious awful stuff, if it is allied to a cause they support. So examples are -

1. Accepting PIE as a civil rights issue - child abuse. Accepted because it was allied to gay rights movement,
2. Supporting the proposed legislation that was never passed to limit free speech about religion. There was a big campaign against it by authors and playwrights, but most in the left supported it as protecting against islamophobia, even though it was an incredibly wide reaching piece of proposed legislation - making criticism of religion legally hate speech. Accepted because it was allied to fight against racism and islamophobia,
3. The crazier outreaches of transgenderism - claiming sex is socially constructed. Accepted because it is allied to the LGB movement.

I am fascinated by this because being honest here, I don't see the right wing doing anything equivalent. But the left wing do it again and again. I know not everyone left wing does it, but I think there must be an inherent element of the left wing movement that makes it vulnerable to this stuff?

Because they have lost their sense of class analysis and replaced it with neo liberalism.

Nothing in socialism supports prostitution as an example and yet it astounds me how unpopular it is to say you are anti it and why.

I say this as an ex LP member and life long voter of the LP. Now, politically homeless.

I as a fairly left wing person can not understand how anyone could condone the notion that abuse of a child or teenager not emotional mature enough is anything but evil of the highest order. I want racists homophobes etc to be able to spout their bile, then those idiotic viewpoints can be shown for the backwards rubbish they are. Also it is better that the people that spread such hate are above ground so we have a good idea of who they are and they can't do the 'they are scared of our truth' BS routine. The whole trans thing has got quite frightening to me, the whole cotton ceiling thing is damned sexually abusive and science is pretty clear on human sexing.
The right does have its denial of evidence wing, look at the climate science deniers as an example.

Identity politics has taken over the left. It's no longer a movement that supports the working class, it's been infiltrated by people who just want to progress in politics, and identity politics makes careers.

There's actually a book about this very subject

www.amazon.co.uk/Tribe-Liberal-Left-System-Diversity-Societas/dp/1845409752?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

There have always been two parts to the left. There were various social reformers and do-gooders who wanted to help the poor. And then there were the poor themselves, who wanted to defend themselves against the rich. People used to contrast these two approaches as "socialism from above" and "socialism from below".

It is difficult in any organisation to stick your neck out and nobody wants to be unpopular. There is also always a power differential between the leadership and the rank and file. Left-wing organisations ought to encourage their members to challenge the leadership if they disagree, but they rarely do. But if you can’t speak up when your own group is wrong, how are you ever going to be capable of leading others when the next election/the revolution/whatever comes?

Solidarity is a value of the left and some confuse it with uncritical adoration. There is definitely something of an attitude that oppressed people shouldn’t be criticised in a way that might help the right demonise them. Of course this also happens on the right – think of people who won’t hear a word of criticism of the Army, the Royals etc.

The decline of the working class movement is an important factor, I think. There are now several million fewer union members than in the 1980s, and almost no official strikes. That movement created rank and file organisers who were experienced in leadership and not afraid of verbal conflict. If you spouted nonsense to them, they'd have the confidence and experience to argue back.

That layer hardly exists any more. The left is now dominated by the socialism-from-above types who have The Correct Positions that they expect everyone else to accept.

Nothing in socialism supports prostitution as an example and yet it astounds me how unpopular it is to say you are anti it and why.

Socialist in the tweets, free-market capitalists in the sheets.